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Poll: Your opion about a game based on my vision.
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DO WANT
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2 15.38%
SORT of WANT
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6 46.15%
DO NOT WANT
38.46%
5 38.46%
Total 13 vote(s) 100%
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A vision for civ

written as a tribute to dh_epic's "A Big Vision for Civilization 4" and Sullla's New Civ.

I am playing (thinking) with a vision for a long time now. decided to post here on Realmsbeyond. mischief
it will be divided into sections. section's text will be put in spoilers to not overwhelm anyone lol
clarifications will be in parentheses.

the basics:
each nation starts with a settler unit. it can build a city. square grid (e.g. tile-based); 21 workable tiles. the game is turn-based.
civ shall stay a god-game.

1. What type of game is this?
An empire-building god-game.

2. What will players spend most of their time doing?
managing cities/provinces, sending resources, building stuff in cities and on tiles, deciding which inventions/civics to enact, interacting with other nations through diplo.

3. A synopsis of key points/differences:
* city tile yields nothing
* no sliders
* exponential city growth
* units cost population
* "healing" (e.g. restoring hit points) a unit consumes population as well
* infinite buildings in a city
* send any resources from any city to any city
* a zero-sum game -> no whipping, rush buying, drafting, etc.
* no workers. tile improvements are build in a "Call to Power 1" style (the resources needed for a tile improvement are taken out of the capitol's stored resources)
* wonder recognition mechanic. all players can build the Pyramids, but only one's Pyramids can be a world wonder once all the players recognize it through diplo
* wonders as tile improvements. think Hoover Dam. such would create additional trade-offs about tile usage and defense
* tile yields can go negative
* orbital (space) layer much like Call to Power 1 with twists
* water, land, space tile improvements.
* no tech trading

nation
each new game each nation is a tabula rasa. of course no nation can have the same color in a game. and each nation will have a historical city's name list.
I have some thoughts on how to shape a nation's identity through player's actions:
award agricultural/industrial/commercial traits bases on how much of the respectful yield is being extracted by player's cities. e.g. if more shields than anything else -> nation becomes industrial.

tile
tile yields are food (sustain population), shields (build stuff), gold (science, civic/invention support, etc.), energy (power the city and/or build advanced units).
a tile cannot be partially worked. it is either worked, or not worked. a tile cannot be worked by more than one city simultaneously.

energy
think electricity. electricity changed the world. most modern buildings will require energy for operation as will some tile improvements. this ties well with the notion of enriching gameplay as the game progresses.

trade
any of the tile yields can be sent to any city from any city. to do that the player must establish a trade route with a unit of any unit type with a non-zero cargo capacity from a city to the desired destination.
after creation of a trade route, any player's unit can be added to the trade route. it's cargo capacity will contribute to the capacity of the trade route. trade routes are seen on the map and can be attacked (raided). all units assigned to the trade route fight as one unit group. in the case the defending (those unts assigned to the trade route) unit group looses, gets some percent of the resources in transit (see combat section).
resources received do not go through any multipliers in the receiving city. those resources are directly added to the city's resource storage.

terrain (tile specs)
apart from the obvious (elevation, movement cost, yields, etc.) each terrain type will have these extra parameters:
since city sizes are out, each tile has a terrain type workforce parameter: how many population (pop for short) are needed to work this tile. tile improvements and/or inventions may modify this parameter.
cover: damage reduction (notably forests/jungles, less hils/mountains). can be modified by tile improvements (notably fort and the like). (see combat for how cover works)

population
has a nationality attribute and an allegiance attribute. German pop living in a French city will have a French allegiance, but German nationality. the German player can manipulate German pop living outside of German allegiance through foreign civics as described in the civic section.

pop produces pollution.

health
the pop in a city is increased by health multiplied by "percent per health".
e.g. city.pop(t + 1) = city.pop(t) * (1 + (city.health(t) * percent_per_health) / 100); t is turn number.
sources of health are buildings like a hospital provide +1 health and add 3 health slots to the city, wonders, inventions, and civics.
the nation of the pop "born" is determined by what nation has max influence on the city tile on the turn. e.g. a French city will add German pop to it, if the German influence is the biggest (max) on the French city tile.

city
city sizes are out.
the new city shall start with the same number of pop that is required to build a settler unit. pop's nationality is the nationality of the settler.
city's pop can work tiles, work in buildings (specialists), or idle. all pop consumes food each turn.
all resources extracted are placed in storage. all city-focused costs (like building stuff in the building queue or sending resources elsewhere through trade routes) are deducted from this storage. a city can build multiple thingies in a turn if it has sufficient resources, or a city can choose to build nothing and accumulate resources for future use.
there should be rally points (static and dynamic (to unit groups, etc.)).
a city can have any number of a buildings (type) in it (e.g. infinite).
a city must have enough infrastructure to support all buildings. a city shall have an "infrastructure capacity". likewise pop also needs infra for support. infra is build as any other building type (e.g. can build infinte copies).

pollution
pollution lowers city's health and/or happiness. there are two sources of pollution: pop and buildings (like factories).
pollution can be fought by builing appropriate buildings and/or applying appropriate inventions in the province(s) to whom the polluting cities belong.

buildings & specialists
work the same as always. a building enhances the city by consuming some infrastructure capacity and/or resources (like energy huh!) (and pop to fill specialist slots if applicable).
a building can add specialist slots to the city it is built in. slots are grouped by type. food, shields, gold, health, happiness, etc. specialist type slots.
infrastructure is a building too. it costs zero infrastructure capacity. adds infrastructure capacity.
pop also needs (consumes) some infra.

buildings such as schools, research labs, libraries increase the educational quotient (EQ) of the city. some (advanced) buildings like a robotic factory will have an EQ requirement.

spec slots may grant a bonus in percent. bonuses from buildings and spec slots are additive.

wonder
each wonder in the game starts as a national wonder. e.g. can be only one copy per nation.
the owner can ask other nations to recognize his (national) wonder. the owner will get some addition bonus if a player recognizes this wonder.
If the owner successfully convinces all (not all known nations!) nations to recognize it's national wonder -> the wonder becomes a world wonder giving the owner some insane bonuses. cool
all wonder bonuses scale by pop.
wonders can become obsolete. an obsolete wonder looses it's bonus, but gains a huge influence bonus based on the turn difference between turn built and current turn and how many players recognized it.

tile improvement
work as always. but workers are out. instead everything is build from the capitol storage. as in Call to Power 1 with two differences: resources must be transported to the capitol and tile improvements may cost food/shields/gold/energy/etc.
improvements are exclusive (e.g. cannot have a farm and a mine on the same tile on the same turn).
improvements can increase the pop requirement for the tile.

tile improvements can add percentile bonuses. percent bonuses are additive with each other and multiplicative with the sum of absolute (base 1 food + 1 food) bonuses.
improvement bonuses can be modified by inventions/civics.

province
a group of cities. inventions are applied per province. the player can group cities into provinces as he/she pleases. provinces with different inventions enacted will lower happiness in all the nation's cities.

invention
work per province, except those affecting unit types. those work globally. may cost gold/food/shields/etc. per turn per what is applicable (unit type inventions may cost whatever per unit of the affected unit type) in the province's cities
inventions may enhance buildings and/or tile improvements.
inventions only work in player owned cities.

example:
tech "Chemistry" allows the invention "Fertilizer". if "implemented" in a province, it gives +100% food per farm. 2 shields per farm. -1 health per 500 pop.

happiness
ties with the "will of the people" described below. happiness is a percent value multiplicative with yields from worked tiles. goes from 0 (nothing is extracted), to 100 (normal resource extraction), to well, it's unlimited (200 happiness will double yields from tiles). cool
lowering happiness of a city to below zero will cause the city to revolt and secede from the nation on the next turn smoke

will of the people
pop reacts to your actions. their opinion of the player is directly mirrored in happiness. quote from "A Big Vision for Civilization 4" by dh_epic - "The population experiences happiness or unhappiness about foreign affairs, thus influencing the player’s diplomacy, or raising the expectations at home, or both."
This section is the most vague. banghead
war weariness is a part of the will of the people. It's sort of like if the diplo modifiers from civ4 moved from leader to leader to nation's pop to nation's pop.
also I am thinking along the lines of alignment. a "good" player doing "evil" things (such as breaking treaties, poisoning wells, etc.) will suffer a hit to his alignment and, therefore, a hit with his people (pop) thus lowering happiness in every city. doing "good" things will have the opposite effect.
as US in 1945: do I keep and develop those French cities or give them back for a happiness boost at home? smoke

I think that alignment of the player can be chosen at startup ranging from good to evil. it is important to remember that alignment is an attribute of the player's pop, not the player himself. the player has no game attributes.

government & civics
the model that is in Bioshock with gene slots and such can be directly "borrowed".
a government is something vague like "autocracy" (rule of one), "aristocracy" (rule of a select "elite" group), "democracy" (rule of the people).

civics shall be grouped by categories as in civ4, but the difference is that the each *cracy shall have a different number of civic category slots.

for example, autocracy may have more military slots. democracy may have more finance slots.

most civics also differ by class: domestic civics affect your nation's pop in your cities (e.g. nationality = allegiance). foreign civics affect your nation's pop in cities belonging to other nations (e.g. nationality != allegiance). some civics may be universal.

unit
a unity type has the following stats: domain (land/water/air/etc.), melee damage, bombard(ranged) damage, bombard range (in tiles), max health, armor, movement, cargo capacity, a cargo capacity type: what can be carried: resources/land units/air units/etc., allegiance, nationality.

units do cost pop. this pop cost is subtracted from the population of the city. pop is subtracted from the dominant nationality. the nationality of the new unit is the dominant nationality.

experience - a unit gets xp points for inflicting damage. as of now, xp will increase cover utilization. more experienced units lessen the effects of congestion(see below) on themselves.

"healing" in a city lowers the xp of the unit proportionally.

on units and cargo capacity:
before railroad, resource transport by land will be limited. of course there will be wagon trains, caravans, etc., but their cargo capacity is inferior to water-based vessels. to abuse the trade route mechanic, the player must place all his cities on the coast or on a river.

unit group
a way to unite units into one entity. a unit group fights and moves as one. obviously must contain unit types from the same domain.

combat
the basic inflicted damage formula: attacker.damage() * attacker.damage() / (attacker.damage() + defender.armor() + tile.cover());
if defender.armor() and tile.cover() are both zero then inflicted damage is equal to attacker.damage().

unit group vs unit group:
1. bombard (ranged) combat:
(*) each unit in the attacking unit group applies it's ranged damage (obviously must be within bombard range) in an undetermined way to a unit in the attacked stack.

2. battle:
battles are not instantaneous. unlike in previous versions, a battle as an entity exists at least one full turn (e.g. both players involved will get a full turn to make decisions about the battle). battle is fought on the defender's tile. the attacker does not gain the benefit(s) of the tile he attacked from, while the defender does gain the benefit(s) of the defending tile.

combat happens in the same manner as in 1 (*) with two notable differences:
1. melee damage is used
2. unit group 1 deals damage to unit group 2. all damage is recorded. then the groups switch sides. all damage is recorded. after that, the recorded damage is applied to both unit groups. in other words the unit groups fight each other simultaneously.

congestion
a penalty to a unit group's combat effectiveness as it grows. as of now, I am not sure how this will work or maybe the whole congestion thingy is superfluous.

science
techs are researched the same way.
gold to finance research is taken out of capitol's coffers. gold from other cities must be send to the capitol, if it is to be used for research.

gold is converted to beakers by multiplying the gold amount by the eq_coefficient (EQ stands for educational quotient. a player can raise EQ in his cities by building schools/universities/libraries/reserch labs/etc. a mean EQ across all player's cities is used in the eq_modifier. eq_modifier starts at 1 and grows from there.).


influence (renamed and reworked culture)
wonders, some buildings (notably radio station, television, maybe opera house?) provide additive and/or multiplicative bonuses to influence.
total influence is the sum of the per city influence in absolute values generated from all player's cities. this nation-wide influence is applied to every player's city. it goes through the local multipliers and goes outward decaying by some percent from tile ring to the next ring. whoever nation has the most influence on a city tile is that's nation pop will be added to the city if (when!) it grows next turn.

example:
a French city - 1000 pop. has +3 health (lets say that each health gives +5% growth). German influence is larger (bigger) than the French.
on next turn 150 German (nationality) pop is "born". now this French city has 1150 pop. 1000 French and 150 Germans.

feel free to ask questions smug
me on civfanatics.com
An ideal strategy game would tone down efficiency challenges, while promoting choices and conflicts
No gods or kings. Only Man.
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A couple quick comments for you.

* As a veteran of the older Civilization games, I would not want to go back to a system of corruption again. It's a poor gameplay mechanic, the very definition of "anti-fun" and it doesn't do anything to stop players from spamming cities across the map everywhere. Even as a thought exercise, this is not the best way to approach design.

* The trade mechanic sounds incredibly abusable. I would expect to see players setting up dummy cities to send food/production/commerce to "real" cities with more multipliers. Trust me, you don't want to recreate Civ1/Civ2 caravans again.

* This outline makes the most common mistake of newcomers to game design, which is focusing on things that "sound awesome" instead of nailing down the core elements of the gameplay. All this stuff about provinces and inventions and will of the people could be worked out later. I would instead begin by answering your core questions about the gameplay: What type of game is this? What will players spend most of their time doing? If it's a traditional Civilization game, then 90% of gameplay will focus around managing workers/tile improvements/cities. That's where the attention should be. Your city management system would be a radical reinvention for the series, and it would need a lot of intense planning. At the moment, I can't even tell what energy is supposed to do as a resource, and that's a problem!

Interesting thoughts nonetheless, thanks. smile
Follow Sullla: Website | YouTube | Livestream | Twitter | Discord
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That's not even really ICS ... it was just Civ 3 efficient wink

I think corruption could have a place in Civ games if treated right. It just can't be the sole limitation on one form of output (gold and production from tiles) while not addressing other forms of output (specialists, drafting, whipping, score).

In Civ 3 corruption didn't accomplish it's goals because it addressed the first group but didn't address the second group at all. There was no other mechanic that addressed the second group either. Worse, to try to compensate for not addressing the second group, but trying to hit it's overall target of limiting snowballs, it went way overboard on the first group. This made corrupt cities still valuable to those using gamey exploits, and essentially useless to players playing more naturally.

While a little variation in value of factors between playstyles is good (if everything is perfectly balanced, situational choices no longer matter), such extreme variation causes problems.

I do have a problem with the target as well. While snowballs can be a problem, I don't think punishing a player for doing well is the answer. Certainly not with hard (or even ~hard) limits.
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The population nationality/allegience seems similar to the pops in Victoria 2, which only was a factor because in that game most expansion is done by war. Immigration also made them matter. Unless immigration is implemented or the map is filled up very fast, they will almost never matter outside of lategame.
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Civ IV (and III for that matter) already sort of has a "will of the people" when it comes to war- losing units or killing lots of enemy units outside your territory causes gradually increasing unhappiness. Having the game punish players for conquering territory or fighting wars or being otherwise mean to the AI sounds really awful- not only does that penalize more aggressive play-styles, but it forecloses the possibility of the player leading a nation that venerates war. When I play, I imagine myself not so much playing "X leader" as embodying the spirit of my entire empire. If I feel like being an asshole to the AI (and I almost always do), then I would expect my "people" to generally feel the same way, and not have some separate will of their own (outside of being upset at certain obvious abuses of the public on my part, like whipping).
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updated first post

(July 23rd, 2014, 16:29)Sullla Wrote: A couple quick comments for you.

* As a veteran of the older Civilization games, I would not want to go back to a system of corruption again. It's a poor gameplay mechanic, the very definition of "anti-fun" and it doesn't do anything to stop players from spamming cities across the map everywhere. Even as a thought exercise, this is not the best way to approach design.
yeah. corruption is a punishing mechanic. but there is no way around it though. there must be some mechanic to limit ICS. otherwise ICS becomes the best strategy. if it is the best strategy - it becomes the only strategy.

the only viable alternative to corruption is civ4's maintaince mechanic. I do not particularily like it, but it does work.

civ4's inflation is a poor gameplay mechanic, the very definition of "anti-fun". I hate inflation. why? for the most part because the player has no control over it. inflation sucks.

it's the player's choice to spam cities. a city starts with zero health. so.. hm... lol more power to the spammer I guess!
me on civfanatics.com
An ideal strategy game would tone down efficiency challenges, while promoting choices and conflicts
No gods or kings. Only Man.
Reply

(July 24th, 2014, 08:24)Hail Wrote: yeah. corruption is a punishing mechanic. but there is no way around it though. there must be some mechanic to limit ICS. otherwise ICS becomes the best strategy. if it is the best strategy - it becomes the only strategy.

Or maybe this is a sign of a core design flaw ?
Civ has quite a few of those (for instance, gold. No iteration of the franchise ever managed that aspect in a satisfying fashion).

Cities as they stand in Civilization just may be the issue. You've a got a magical tile that can support any number of buildings, gets magical ressources (trade routes, etc...), etc. So obviously, the more you have, the better.
Doing away with that magical "city" tile just might be one of the needed design shifts.

One idea would be for instance to have buildings as tile improvements (a tile can host a farm, or a library, not both).
And the city center tile, while needed to define the city, would be essentially a wasted tile.
--> "Paradigm Shift" is the fashionable phrase I believe.

The other side of the coin is the growth mecanism.
In order to fully remove ICS as "the" strategy you have to introduce mecanisms to counter, growth should probably stop being per city. At any rate, the balance altered so that a bunch of small cities wouldn't necessarily yield way more global growth than a single mature city.
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(July 24th, 2014, 08:24)Hail Wrote: yeah. corruption is a punishing mechanic. but there is no way around it though. there must be some mechanic to limit ICS. otherwise ICS becomes the best strategy. if it is the best strategy - it becomes the only strategy.

As Sullla pointed out though, corruption doesn't limit ICS. Neither does Civ4 maintenance, although it does a much better job than corruption of slowing expansion down. Corruption makes some cities weak, but never causes a city to be a net negative for your empire in any dimension. As a result, since claiming more land and getting another build queue on the board are usually more than worth the price of a settler on their own, near-ICS expansion is ~always the right answer in a corruption-based game like Civ3.

There are ways to actually limit ICS though: Expensive but powerful multiplier buildings (especially multiplier Wonders) can help because they make a city with a full BFC of tiles to work potentially more valuable than several smaller cities sharing the same tiles. Allowing multiple builds to complete on the same turn would help a lot in situations (e.g. cash-rushing, whipping, city with massive production) where it is reasonable to expect at least one build to finish per turn. Taking away the free stuff you get with the city center tile (as Wyatan mentioned) and/or making it easier to grow existing cities larger would also make ICS less appealing.

I have a sneaking suspicion though that by ICS (Infinite City Sprawl: Cramming in the maximum possible number of separate cities in whatever land area you manage to claim) you actually mean REX (a strategy of Rapid EXpansion). Both Civ3's corruption and Civ5's empire-wide happiness limits were meant to curb REX, but REX is so good intrinsically in the basic design of both games that players just wound up inventing gamey strategies - with ICS being an important component of the most successful ones in each - to overcome the artificially-imposed limits. If you want to limit REX, and you want to make a good game, do not use a mechanic that punishes the player for REXing! This will only force the player to figure out some ridiculous strategy like ICS that gets around your punishment ... or to stop playing your game.

If you come up with alternate strategies and find ways to reward the player for using them sufficiently to bring them on par with REX in long-term value (meaning some situations will call for various ones of them while others still call for REX) then you have a chance to make a great strategy game. If you don't come up with alternate strategies, and instead try to weaken the game's only strategy, you're actually weakening the entire game.

(In Civ4, early Wonders are good examples of alternatives to REX. Sometimes, the likes of Stonehenge, the Oracle, or the Pyramids are worth more for your empire than the "More Workers and Settlers" wonder that has always been so powerful. Of course, you'll still want those workers and settlers afterward, but that's a good thing: It's an empire-building game. The player should probably be building an empire at some point, right?)
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(July 24th, 2014, 08:24)Hail Wrote: civ4's inflation is a poor gameplay mechanic, the very definition of "anti-fun". I hate inflation. why? for the most part because the player has no control over it. inflation sucks.

The vast majority of Civ4 players probably have no idea 'inflation' exists in the game. And if they know it exists, the vast majority will certainly have no idea how it works. It's a stealth mechanic that is designed to balance the lategame.

Overall, I've always thought that ICS can be solved simply by allowing cities to grow more exponentially. Thinking about it just from a historical standpoint, it’s frankly ridiculous that a city with a population of 10,000 (size 1) gives 20% of the output, in terms of tiles, of a city of roughly half a million (size 9). So having the output of a city be closer to its actual population, as recorded by the game, might be a useful goal.

(How you go about achieving that, I’ve no idea…)
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The way EXP is gained makes "joint military training exercises" the fastest way to gain EXP in multiplayer. You take turns hitting each other's unit until you have reached either the EXP cap (if there is one) or an insanely high amount, then go and stomp on everyone else.
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